There are 3 items tagged:bulgaria

Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living.

Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. The music, distinguished by its haunting harmonies, was briefly popular in western Europe, and still enjoys a small but loyal audience.

But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living. So Diana (better known by her stage name, Dayana) has decided to become a pop star.

She sings chalga, a popular form of dance music in central Europe. She performs for $10 a night at clubs, plus tips. It’s hardly glamorous, but stardom could be just around the corner.

The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people – one Israeli, one Palestinian – that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East. Winner of a Christopher Award, Booklist’s best adult non-fiction book of 2006, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a 25-year-old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled 19 years earlier.

To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a 19-year-old Israeli college student, whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust.

On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the shadow of war and tested over the next half century in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967.

The Lemon Tree grew out of Sandy’s award-winning documentary for NPR’s Fresh Air. The book won a Christopher Award for “affirming the highest values of the human spirit” and was Booklist’s “Editor’s Choice” for best adult non-fiction book of 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Bulgaria’s Jews are survivors, but the language they have spoken for centuries is in trouble. Sandy Tolan visits with some of Bulgaria’s last Ladino speakers as they try to keep the tongue from going silent.

Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit the country you’ll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children and head for – where? You’ve heard that you will be safe in a faraway place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.

So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria, along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a name of its own: Ladino.

In 2003, I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in tracing her story I’d come to understand how it was that she came to be born – how most of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised to find that I could communicate in Spanish – not perfectly, as many of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of March, 1943 – how they and their families avoided the trains bound for Treblinka.

One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino, which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and proverbs, and to teach the next generation – sprightly 60-somethings – what they know. Often they’re joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi, whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations of a long, deep history.

If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria, where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold. Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the 1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the hope is that the language won’t die there – that the tongue may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.